


Linger

by Helholden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cannibalism, Gen, Horror, Murder, POV Male Character, Skinchanging, Survival Horror, Torture, Warging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 23:05:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1049631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helholden/pseuds/Helholden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A desperate and dying man watches as a group travels North towards the Wall, the very place he had recently escaped from, but he is dying . . . and he needs a new body to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Linger

**Author's Note:**

> **Author’s Notes:** This is a complete Alternate Universe from multiple canon events. I think of it an alternate beginning to “A Dance with Dragons” with Bran and Hodor, Sansa, and Sandor Clegane having followed different paths to wind up together and heading towards the Wall to meet Jon. Backstory doesn't really matter, and there are no book spoilers. This is, plain and simple, a horror story. I wanted to showcase how even a fic with horrible subjects could exhibit qualities that give it merit. It will be dark, uncomfortable, and downright messed up, but I'm very happy with the ending and how it turned out overall. If you expect a happy ending and a clean fic, turn back now.

* * *

 

Through the white wood, his eyes watched them. Their figures shucked through tufts of snow, feet trudging hopelessly towards the Wall. The group was walking towards it, but he had run away from it. The crows had given all of the wildlings passage beneath the Wall to the other side after the battle has been lost. Varamyr had crossed the gate with them, but he had stolen provisions from the stock they were handing out to the wildlings for his journey southward. However, he was running low. He needed to eat. They had food. They had sturdy cloaks. They had means for building a fire each night, and so he watched them and waited because they had a direwolf, too.

 

The direwolf stalking their trail reminded him of the turncloak crow Jon Snow’s direwolf. Snow’s beast had been a great animal, its fur as white as pristine snow freshly fallen from the sky and the red eyes of a hunter. This one was smaller with silver dappled grey fur and yellow eyes. They carried a cripple boy with them, and his companion was an overly large but senseless man who repeated nothing but one word over and over again. The girl was young but beautiful with auburn hair, and her companion was the strongest and most fearsome of the company. He walked with a lame leg, but a lame leg was better than a lame brain.

 

 _Abomination_ , a voice whispered to him in the back of his mind. Abomination had been Haggon’s favorite word in his life. Everything had been an abomination to Haggon. The man had loved his rules too much. It had held back his power. It was abomination to eat human flesh. _Abomination_. It was an abomination to mate with a wolf while in a wolf’s skin. _Abomination_. The worst abomination of them all was to force oneself into the body of another man. _Abomination,_ Haggon said even in his death, _abomination_ , _abomination_.

 

Haggon had been afraid of his power, though. Varamyr was not afraid of it. He reveled in it.

 

He accepted it.

 

Varamyr knew what awaited them at the Wall. He had to make his move before they got any closer. He dared not travel too close to them with that direwolf of theirs in tow. Varamyr had smelled the scent of warg on turncloak crow Snow, but he smelled it on the child and the girl as well. Neither of them was trained in the gift, but they were wargs. Another skinchanger could always smell one. He wondered day and night which one of them controlled the direwolf, but the direwolf showed no signs of favoritism. He guarded the entire pack.

 

As nighttime fell and the company took shelter in an abandoned hovel, Varamyr watched as they built a fire. The girl went inside to make her bed. The two men and the boy stayed outside, the cripple in a wheelbarrow.

 

One Eye was nearby, prowling the trees. Varamyr watched as the direwolf slunk off into the trees in the opposite direction. _He goes to hunt_ , Varamyr thought. _As he hunts, so I will_.

 

Varamyr waited in the biting cold, shivering, physically weak, and dying. He knew he was dying. He could feel it. It was there, deep in his bones. His mind was strong, though. He could take the big man with the lame leg. Hours passed, and all but one fell to sleep. The companion of the cripple boy had fallen asleep on the side of the hovel, leaning against the wall between two stacks of firewood, which must have served as shelter against the wind. The cripple boy was in his wheelbarrow by the fire, and the big man was the only one left awake. Varamyr watched as the big man stood up, stalking off into the trees.

 

He had to make his move now.

 

Varamyr unsheathed his knife. He crept forward towards the hovel as shadows danced around the grounds from the flickering flames. He would take care of the larger companion first. As he drew closer, he raised the knife. It glimmered in the faint moonlight above, catching silver in the dark, before he drove it straight into the windpipe of the large man.

 

His eyes shot open, panicked and confused at what was happening. Large hands grappled for purchase, but found none. His mouth opened to scream, but no sound save gurgling came out as warm blood poured freely down Varamyr’s hands. He watched the light leave the man’s eyes as his body fell limp against the wall, and then he withdrew the blade from the man’s throat.

 

Next, it was the boy.

 

Varamyr crept up from behind and sliced his throat, drawing the knife so deep as to sever the windpipe. He wanted no screams to echo off into the night. It was essential to take the big man with the lame leg by surprise, or he might not have the strength to overpower him. The girl was sleeping inside the hovel. His wolf, One Eye, prowled in a circle around their den.

 

Varamyr was starving. He needed to eat. He quickly searched their corpses for food, but found none. Agitation crept up into his bones, and he ground his teeth together. His stomach cramped painfully from being empty for so long. It was a wonder it did not eat itself.

 

He froze like his wolf, listening. Heavy footsteps were drawing near.

 

 _The man returns_.

 

The wildlings believed in wargs. The wildlings knew they were real. A wildling would put up a better fight than any man south of the Wall. Varamyr knew this, and still he was wary.

 

He moved himself into the shadows next to the rundown hovel. He would take the man in unawares if he was to have his best chance. Varamyr saw him appear around the corner, walking towards the open fire. _Quick_ , Varamyr thought, _before he realizes_ _something is wrong_.

 

Varamyr summoned every ounce of strength inside of him to leap from his own body, his consciousness rising into the air like a spectral form, and forced himself inside of the man.

 

It was a fight unlike any fight he had faced before, even those he had undertaken with his shadowcat who used to go half-mad from it. She always fought him to the bone, hard and wild and resentful of his intrusions. This was worse. The man did not scream or holler, but the shock of it brought out a guttural sound in him, which echoed off the woodland surrounding them. Varamyr’s old skin had fallen limp to the ground, devoid of life. He was now in the man’s body, but the man was fighting him to the core. Varamyr sought to gain control, striving against the man’s consciousness in one form. They collided into the side of the hovel as the man wrenched back violently, and Varamyr felt heavy hands grasp at his head, gripping hard. No words were said out loud, but the man released a guttural howl into the night through their shared mouth. Spasms overtook his body. In their fight his body lost balance, the legs collapsing beneath them, bringing them both to the ground.

 

It was then that the young woman came outside from within the hovel, wrapped in fur cloak with a look of fear in her eyes. She saw them, and Varamyr saw her. His eyes locked on her pretty features, flushed cheeks, red hair, and bright blue eyes, and the strife inside of his head suddenly fell silent.

 

In the moment of silence, Varamyr took over.

 

 _I have won_.

 

The girl continued to stare at him. Her mouth was open in shock. She took a step forward, though it was hesitant, and then another. “My lord?” she asked softly, her voice wavering at the attempt.

 

He stared at her for a moment. Then, he said, “I’m not your lord.”

 

His voice came out deep and raspy like the sound of steel grating against stone. However, it was the right thing to say. The girl noticeably loosened up, and a soft smile dared to curl up the corner of her mouth. Out of the corner of her vision, she noticed his former lifeless body slumped against the side of the hovel. Her pretty mouth gasped, and she took a step away.

 

“I killed him,” Varamyr said in his new voice. “He . . . killed the others.”

 

A look of horror entered the girl’s eyes, and she quickly turned her head towards the boy in the wheelbarrow. She rushed to his side, hands flying to her mouth to cover it as tears spilled from her eyes in the glow of the firelight. The girl did not scream or holler, but she stood there in shock before sobs overtook her body. She bent down, lifting the boy’s head to cradle it in her arms. Varamyr watched her in silence, pushing himself back to his feet.

 

This was a powerful body, a strong body.

 

In his victory of triumph and spilt blood, Varamyr stared at the young woman. A new desire coursed through his veins, not entirely of his own making. This man had wanted her. This man had desired her. Varamyr felt it as it mixed in with his bloodlust. It had been so long since he had had a proper woman.

 

Too long, in fact.

 

Varamyr approached her side slowly, laying his hand on her arm. “Come now,” he said in this deep voice, grating and rough. “There’s nothing you can do. We must get inside and stay warm for the night. Tomorrow, we move again.”

 

“He is my brother,” she choked out. “I cannot leave him like this—”

 

Varamyr wrenched her away from the dead boy. He did not care if the crippled boy was her brother. He did not care if she wanted to cry all night about it. She could weep until her eyes were red and sore and her nose full of snot. He did not care.

 

In her protests and struggles, he dragged her inside of the hovel.

 

He pushed her to the ground on a makeshift bed of furs she had made to sleep upon, and the girl curled into herself like a babe and cried some more. Despite her cries, he could not quell the _want_ that burned in his belly. If he was some lord and she a chambermaid, he could have her without a fight. She would not refuse him, not even in her agony.

 

Varamyr knelt on the ground beside her on one knee. She was lying on her side, but he urged her onto her back. She did not seem to register him much until he placed his hands on her knees, spreading them open. She scooted herself away from him, then, twisting her legs from his grasp. Her sobs subsided long enough to be replaced with a silent look of shock and fear mixed with confusion. The girl stared at him as if she did not recognize him anymore.

 

She was right, of course. He was a different man now.

 

“Don’t fight me, girl,” he told her gruffly. “You might even like it.”

 

He snatched her leg again, and she was so paralyzed with fear that she did not move but to breathe. She did not fight him as Varamyr dragged her back to him, hiking up the layers of her dress in the process. Whether it was silent submission or the realization that she could not physically fight him, he didn’t much care. He pushed it up further to get it out of the way and settled himself between her legs. This new body was powerful, even with a lame leg, and his shadow loomed over her face in the darkness, shrouding her tearful expression.

 

Every muscle of her body was as rigid as a tree as he slid his hand over her thigh and up her leg to the sweet spot in the center beneath her smallclothes. His fingers were cold and callused, but he touched her with them, anyway. He felt nothing, no reaction from her, no wetness to show she liked it, so he removed his fingers. He was not going to waste his time if it did nothing. Varamyr opened his breeches and freed himself, using quick strokes to ready himself for her. In the dark he noticed her head was turned away from him, her eyes glazed and far away.

 

Pulling the strings on her smallclothes, he pushed them out of the way. He spat on his hand, rubbed it over the tip of his cock, and positioned himself at her entrance. When he pushed into her, she was as tight as a maid. By her youth alone, he might have suspected her to be one. As he took her maiden’s gift from her, her silence was broken with a whimper. He sunk himself deeper, and she was warm and tight but as dry as a desert. He began thrusting with slow strokes to make it easier for himself. He was not concerned about her or the tears in her eyes, only with possessing her and spending his seed inside of her.

 

The maid’s body betrayed her, and he soon found it easier to fuck her as she became slick. He sped up his thrusts, faster and harder until he lost himself in the motions. He came not long after, not bothering to pull out. His heart was racing, and the cold air became noticeable again. The small reprieve was already gone, and her eyes were purposefully shut, her lips sealed in a tight line.

 

He removed himself, rolling over to the area beside her, and fixed his breeches. The girl was paralyzed next to him, so much so that she didn’t even bother to pull her dress back down; he had to do it, and then he put a strong arm around her middle and pulled her close. Not to comfort her, though. It was cold outside. Snow filled the land. Her body would provide him warmth, and he was going to use it.

 

“Get some sleep,” he said—in that same unfamiliar raspy voice. He pulled one of the furs over them to give them further shelter against the cold in that hovel. She did not protest. Silence befell her, and it remained until he fell asleep.

 

When he awoke in the morning to an early dawn, Varamyr smelled blood on the air. He got up from the makeshift bed and went outside, seeing a blood red trail stretching across the snow—the trail of a dragged body. In the distance he saw his wolf, One Eye, feasting on the remains of what looked like a small human.

 

Varamyr glanced at the wheelbarrow. The cripple boy’s body was missing from it.

 

Suddenly angry, Varamyr stalked off to the packs laying against the hovel that the group had been carrying with them for their journey. He tore into the sacks, searching for food. Even in this new body, his stomach rumbled with hunger and pains shot through his belly like knives in his guts. He needed to eat. Why was he so _hungry_? He considered warging into his wolf, One Eye, and feasting on the boy with him. All of the meat would go into One Eye’s belly, though, not his. He would still be hungry, and if he didn’t eat, he would still die.

 

Varamyr threw down the pack in his hands, its contents spilling over the snow. Clothes, cups, bowls, and books. Useless items, all of them. He would be able to use none of them to quell his need for food. He stalked into the hovel on his lame leg, leaning past the open doorway.

 

“Where is the _food_?” Varamyr shouted at the sleeping girl. She jolted in her sleep, turning her head and opening her eyes, though she pulled the furs higher to her neck. She looked at him again as if she did not know him, fear and confusion and pain written across her face as last night’s events no doubt came back to her.

 

“It’s gone,” she answered, almost choking on the words. “It’s been gone, my . . . my lord. You’ve . . . you’ve known that.”

 

Varamyr wanted to snarl like a wolf. “I told you,” he spat, “I’m not your _lord_.”

 

The girl flinched, looking away.

 

“Get up,” he ordered, “and start a fire.”

 

 _No food_ , he thought. _No food_. What was he to do with no food? The girl slowly got up from where she lay, gathering the blankets and furs together. Varamyr left the hovel. It took him a moment to realize it, but there was a sword hanging at his side. He pulled the blade from its scabbard, staring at the sharp steel. He tested his thumb against it. It drew blood, ruby red upon a silver gleam.

 

Varamyr looked up towards the end of the hovel. The stacks of firewood. The fat man’s body.

 

He walked around the hovel, finding the fat man’s corpse still there. The cold had preserved him overnight, so there was no stink. The man was not yet rotting. Varamyr lifted his sword, and he came down hard, severing the left arm from the dead man’s body. Any meat was good meat, and Varamyr had eaten human flesh before.

 

He stripped off the cloth, chopped off the hand, and then he took his time to skin the arm. It would be the easiest part of the body to use. He got up to grab some of the bowls before returning to crouch beside the body, and sitting down upon the ground, Varamyr began to cut the meat off of the bone and discard the fat. There was a lot of it, too. He heard the crackling sounds of a fire, his ears perking up. Pausing briefly, Varamyr listened to the blissful sound.

 

When he came back around with the meat, the girl was crouched on the ground.

 

“Did you bury my brother, my—” the girl cut herself off before she could finish her sentence, but Varamyr knew what she had meant to say.

 

“No,” he replied gruffly, setting up the meat on a spit, “the wolves got to him overnight.”

 

The girl gasped. Varamyr paused to look at her. She had risen from the ground, her hands tight as iron shackles at her sides. She was staring at the meat, her face growing pale. “Where is his body?” she asked him, and it was almost a demand. “Where did that meat come from?”

 

“His body is over there,” Varamyr said casually, pointing in the direction of the bloodstained trail. “This meat came from the fat one. He has plenty to keep us fed. I’ll carve more later. After we’ve eaten.”

 

Her face paled even more. Her hands flew to her mouth. The girl looked off in the direction of the bloody trail, and then she tore off like a mad thing as if she meant to interrupt One Eye and his snack. Varamyr watched her go. He thought to stop her. She would make a fine bed-warming companion for the nights, but if she was as disobedient as this all of the time, he would grow tired of her quickly. He let her run, and tended to the meat as it roasted above the fire.

 

By the time the meat was cooked to a slight crisp and dribbling with juice, the girl had not returned. Varamyr had not heard her cry, so he did not know if she was dead or if she had just run off. She would not last long in the wilderness on her own, though. The girl should have stayed with him. He would have kept her fed and protected. It had been foolish of her to run off like that, and all for a dead brother.

 

He had a brother once, and his brother was dead, too.

 

Varamyr plucked one of the sticks from the spit, biting into the juicy meat. It was good, and it satisfied the aches within his stomach. As he tore into the meat, the pain subsided until it was almost gone. Juice spilt from the corner of his mouth, dribbling down his chin.

 

As he took one more bite of the meat, a great jaw clamped onto his side and sunk its teeth into his flesh, dragging him away from the fire. Varamyr cried out, and the wolf released him, backing away far enough to bare its bloody teeth at him. Big yellow eyes, burning with rage.

 

Looking beyond the direwolf, Varamyr saw the redheaded girl. She stood there, hands clenched tightly at her sides, her face as white as snow.

 

“Who are you?” she asked him. Though her tone was soft and ladylike, he heard a firm demand in her request.

 

“What do you _mean_ , who am I—”

 

He screamed as the girl’s eyes went white, and the direwolf lunged at him again, biting his arm and yanking at it. A searing pain shot through his muscles up his arm to his shoulder. The direwolf let go, growling as it backed away again.

 

He wondered if he still had his power.

 

Varamyr tried to enter the mind of direwolf, but it was no use. His old power of skinchanging died with his old body. This man had not that gift, but the girl . . .

 

He had smelled it on her. She had the gift. She was a warg.

 

 _And the boy, too, but he’s dead_.

 

Varamyr looked over at his old body, still slumped against the hovel and frozen over like the fat man by the logs. His old body wasn’t frozen into solid ice, but it was chilled enough to preservation. Varamyr stared at his old self. He had been small and weak, even as an adult. _Lump_ , they had called him once. Lump until he had given himself the name of Varamyr Sixskins. He would have been nothing if not for his power, if not for his gift. It had made him everything.

 

. . . And now it was gone. It had left this world with his body, a feeble and small body slumped against an abandoned hovel in the middle of nowhere.

 

“That’s me,” he said in his raspy voice, looking at his old self. “I was following you for days. I meant to take this man’s body. I was dying. I needed to survive, and I did. I’m a skinchanger. Like you. We’re one and the same, girl. I can help you get to where you’re going. You need me.”

 

She stared at him, trembling.

 

Her eyes went white again, and the direwolf drew closer. Varamyr remembered the sword at his side, and he thought to grab it, but he knew the direwolf would lunge before he could use it. Suddenly, the direwolf bit at the hilt and removed the sword with its teeth, dragging the blade across the snow to the girl. Her eyes had turned blue again, and she bent over to pick it up.

 

As Varamyr stared at the shining blade, the direwolf lunged again, tearing at his flesh here and there and everywhere until Varamyr was screaming at the sky in agony. When the direwolf pulled his teeth away, Varamyr could feel the blood soaking through his clothes. It seeped into the cloth with warmth as a dizzying feeling overcame his mind. He was in pain, so much pain, and he could not make it stop.

 

Suddenly, the direwolf snatched his arm with its jaw again, yanking him upright onto his knees. Varamyr obeyed, sitting upright, though he slumped forward. He could not hold himself entirely up. He could feel the warmth leaving him along with the blood from his wounds, a numbness pervading throughout his limbs.

 

“Did you kill my brother, Bran?” she asked this time, and her voice sounded so far away—almost like an echo through the trees.

 

Varamyr closed his eyes, his head swaying. “Yes,” he admitted.

 

“And Hodor?”

 

“Yes,” Varamyr conceded once again.

 

Then, he felt it. The point of the blade pressing hard into his chest, into the area right above his heart. Varamyr opened his eyes, staring down at the silver gleam of polished metal with a distorted reflection of a ruined face staring back at him. It was a man with half of his face burned away, greasy dark hair, and fierce eyes.

 

Slowly, Varamyr raised his eyes to the girl.

 

Despite those slim-fingered hands holding the blade above his heart, the girl was trembling from head to toe. There were tears in her eyes to match the silver of the blade, and though she held her chin high, her bottom lip could not be still for her nerves.

 

“Sandor,” she whispered softly, “are you in there still?”

 

Varamyr almost scoffed at her. He almost answered her with _No, I’m the only one here_ , but that wasn’t true. With skinchanging, possessing new skin never meant ridding it of its former consciousness. Just like taking over the skin of a wolf or a bear or a shadowcat never emptied the animal of its formal self. Varamyr wasn’t the only one possessing this body.

 

This Sandor was still inside.

 

Varamyr felt his mouth twisting, his body quake. A searing pain tore through his flesh and bone as a _push_ shoved him backwards within his own mind. A spasm wracked his muscles, and he was there, in the background like a caged prisoner, but with no control over his mouth or limb.

 

“Do you remember where the heart is?” he felt his mouth ask in a low, tremulous voice, but it wasn’t him speaking.

 

Her eyes welled up with tears, spilling over onto her pale pink cheeks. Biting on her bottom lip, she nodded her head.

 

“ _Do it_ ,” his mouth hissed at her, but again, it wasn’t him speaking.

 

Varamyr pushed with all of his might back to the surface, soaring up as if a fish through water to leap into the sky, and he did. He broke to the surface just long enough for his eyes to fly open at the realization of what was about to happen to him.

 

“No,” he said forcefully, “ _don’t_ —”

 

But she drove the blade home, clean through jerkin and into his heart. Varamyr gasped at the shock, staring back at her as her tears continued to fall and her face twisted with pain. He saw in those eyes, for one brief moment, love as she looked at him, but that love was not for Varamyr.

 

She wrenched the blade from his heart, and Varamyr lost his balance, falling to the cold, soft ground beneath him. The snow cushioned his fall, but it seeped out of him the last bit of warmth he had felt in life, leaving him with nothing but the empty sense of air.

 

Slowly, he swirled away, floating upwards in a cloud of white mist. He watched below as the direwolf licked the girl’s blade clean. She walked towards the hovel, collecting things of use and wrapping herself in the largest fur. She even took the dead man’s sword belt and put it about her waist, sliding the sword into it.

 

And then, she began to walk away, the direwolf prowling about her side. Their bodies vanished into the white snowdrift beyond the trees.

 

Up ahead in the distance, the Wall gleamed with the sun’s newly fallen rays.

 

 


End file.
